Accessible Archivist Coalition Updates

My team and I have been working behind the scenes to make the Accessible Archivist Coalition bigger and better.

For a while now, with our incredible developer, we have been creating a database from scratch to hold all of the public access information we have gathered that we found to be at risk of permanent digital deletion.

This all started with my Katrina Database a couple of years ago, a keyword-searchable mega-spreadsheet I compiled with hundreds of links to thousands of items related to the facts of Hurricane Katrina.

I began working on this after attempting to research data from the storm and finding that information was severely scattered, or worse, at risk of loss. I downloaded as much as I possibly could and backed it up to prevent it from becoming digital dust. As I was working on gathering information from government websites, however, I noticed press releases about the storm were being removed from the White House’s website.

Where before the public had access to information from the executive branch relating to Katrina and its aftermath, it was being slowly but surely eradicated. This was unacceptable. One of the greatest tragedies of our country’s modern era was being wiped away from the record. I went down a research rabbit hole, compiling all I could that was on the public record before it was gone.

During this time, I was reached out to by a historian, Matthew, who soon became my AAC co-founder and dear friend. He mentioned seeing my database, and offered to help back it up and keep it safe. He had the storage, I had the information. Together, we created a means of archival storage for modern history. We joke that we started this project with “a Dropbox and a dream,” hoping to gather as much public information as possible from the Internet to keep it safe from loss or destruction. This particularly took off during the start of the second Trump administration, when DOGE was wiping websites left and right.

It soon became too big for the two of us, too much of a task for a couple of twenty-somethings with full-time jobs to do alone. So we put out a bulletin. I mentioned on TikTok that I was looking for volunteers to help us preserve history, and to my surprise, there was no shortage of people wanting to help. Archivists, historians, project managers, data analysts, social media managers, and just plain volunteers who wanted to be given any task they could help with all came together within our group, which we named the Accessible Archivist Coalition (“The AAC” for short). We wanted our work to be available to everyone, any time, free of charge.

We spent months, and still spend our time, sourcing stories and backing up all the public access information about them in every way we can. Volunteer researchers work tirelessly to keep up with the inundation of information. We keep up with as much of the news as possible, and keep safe matters of public record. It is no small feat, and we could not do it without each and every one of them.

We hope to get our database out to the public soon so anyone can access it. Slowly but surely, we are accomplishing that goal.

We are completely run on the generous donations of folks that want to see us succeed, and want to help preserve the present for the future. We sell merchandise on our website to fund the services that keep us running. (If you’d like to buy a T-shirt or mug to help us keep our lights on, you can do that here.)

Ideally, we want to become a nonprofit organization so that we can apply for grants that would greatly help us grow and take care of the people who take care of us, and we are in the process of doing that now.

It has been and continues to be our priority to keep public information publicly accessible, and we follow in the footsteps of phenomenal organizations like the Internet Archive (who we greatly admire) to guide us on that path.

We are always looking to improve and better our reach. If you’ve supported us in the past, we give you our most sincere thanks, and if you’d like to support us now, or even just want to learn more, you can visit our website at www.theaac.org.